What form of redirect?

...and have you verified the redirect with a server headers checker?

If the redirect has been there for some time, but the problem is very recent, what makes you think the two are related?

Has anything else changed lately?

I get this when I do a header check:

HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

The reason I'm wondering, is that I've never noticed Yahoo display this url before and surely there wouldn't be a lot of backlinks to it. But, I'm unsure as I don't check Yahoo very often.
I'm also missing out on the double indented entry as I have another subpage underneath with the correct url displayed.

Has anything else changed lately?

Yes, I added an adsense unit to the top of the page (and to many subpages) about 5 weeks ago and took it down a few days later. All of the subpages are still ranking very well, most are at #1 for their own keywords.

Confirmed and verified headers. I 301'd a page ages ago and they're still showing the old URL.

I wonder what the consequences will be if I ask Yahoo to remove this url in Site Explorer?

You'd probably whack both the www and the non-www if they are as confused as it seems they are.

Best approach would probably be to leave it alone, and try to get some new links to the proper domain to 'overwhelm' the incorrect domain. Actually, it would probably be a very good idea to look at your inbound links and assess the balance between www and non-www -- Y! may just be following 'majority rule' here, and hasn't yet decided to 'take your word' --the 301-- for it yet if the majority of your inbounds is to www.

Jim

it would probably be a very good idea to look at your inbound links and assess the balance between www and non-www -- Y! may just be following 'majority rule' here

.

This is why I don't understand what is going on. In Site Explorer www. shows just 3 inlinks (all fairly recent) and the non-www shows over 3500!

Anyway, I'm going to leave it alone as you suggest in the belief that it may be a temporary glitch.

I looked, and can't find any backlinks at all to non-www but the homepage shows up both with and without for different searches.

Marcia, how long has this been going on for you?

>>Marcia, how long has this been going on for you?

To be honest, with that site I really don't know for sure because I mostly check for incoming traffic in logs and take a glance when traffic comes in from an engine, so I don't look at rankings too often.

I can say that the homepage of the site was on the first page for one phrase and on the second page for the other, and since this past update word1-word2 is #34 and word1-word3-word2 (which is the one without www) is #25. I just looked again though and did find 2 links without, both scrapers and one with nofollow.

But I HAVE seen Yahoo list the homepage of sites in the past without www when doing a site: search on the domain, so it isn't something brand new with them. In fact, they're doing it now with an indented listing for one of the *big* discount retail chains for a query - one with, one without.

But I've just checked a number of domains using site: and they all have the www including that one. Now I'm thinking maybe it's got something to do with them either checking on subdomains for sites (Inktomi used to dislike them, IIRC), or maybe it's something to do with the relevance of the page or the anchor text that an IBL is on. It isn't consistent enough to be able to tell anything.

they're doing it now with an indented listing for one of the *big* discount retail chains for a query - one with, one without.

I'm not getting an indented listing. I have many search phrases for which a subpage is listed either directly above or below the homepage. Where the homepage appears with www, Yahoo is treating them as not belonging to the same site.

Update - Yahoo have done a switcheroo. they are now showing the correct url for this search phrase, and I have gone from #6 to #2 - not quite reaching my original position but I do now have an indented listing.

However, enquiries that were returning the correct url at the time of my intial post are now showing the wrong url.

I have also had something similar, a www. site home page was dropped from the listings with the non www. being cached but not showing in the SERPS. There are no links to non www. This happened to me around 1st October.

Confirmed and verified headers. I 301'd a page ages ago and they're still showing the old URL.

heck... Yahoo! ignored my redirects for nearly 2 years and even listed my homepage as a subdomain. And yep, for 2 years they ignored my redirect from non-www to www. For 2 years I was in their serp boondocks - way back in page #2,398!

Then for some reason, in the last update, they got EVERY damn thing correct. Homepage listed correctly with www. No more subdomain. Hundreds of redirects completely correct and old URLs removed. And traffic has been flowing steadily from Yahoo for the past couple of weeks.

Go figure.

I once changed the name of a site and moved it to a new domain. Redirected old to new, but now, more than a year later, when I search for the old name in Yahoo, the old domain still shows up. Google handles redirects so much better.

Unfortunetely this isn't new for Yahoo. I've got the same thing going on for a long time on a couple of sites.

But I noticed a change in their crawls recently and IT'S GETTING WORSE. Now they keep trying to crawl 404 pages. There are no backlinks to these non-existing pages whatsoever.

The pattern goes like this:
> Real page ../directory/page.html
> Yahoo trying to crawl ../directory/.. which of course returns a 404.

Well, it's not like yahoo brings significant traffic anyway. But it's stupid how they've always had issues like this and have always been a refuge for spammers.

I have just noticed somthing similar recently.

99 out of 100 people link to my site www.example.com and the http://example.com redirects permanantly (301) to the WWW version. This redirect has been up and running for a long time - close to a year now I belive.

However as of latly the http://example.com is in the index and ranking instead of the WWW version.

Yahoo do indeed bring significant trafic in my book - but since this happened the site is ranking lower - it used to be in top 5 now it's on page 2 and lower :-(

[edited by: Balle at 1:32 am (utc) on Oct. 30, 2008]